Total Conversion

Just donated to adblock on chrome. feels good.

Just installed Ubuntu 11.04 and experiencing Unity for the first time. My head hurts. I can't imagine what it must be like for new users. Is this the future? I feel like I'm playing a complex strategy game without following the tutorials first. I can't imagine what can be done to remedy this. At 1900x1200 it looks absolutely dire. I just wanted to check out the latest mythbuntu, but realising why I stuck with Fedora 14 so long. I'm planning an F15 install on my laptop and dreading what Gnome3 is going to be like. Seems like XCFE / KDE4 will become my default from now on. Thankfully the one Mint box I still have in the family remains a sane choice I can recommend to others.

Rage HD from ID Software free on IOS this week. Will be borrowing wife's IPAD while she's sleeping.

Bloody excel boffins. I can't draw to save my life. This guy draws using a spreadsheet. Aaargh! Microsoft Excel Drawing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WvHXDepqAQ

So my kids were playing Singstar on PS3 hooked up to my PC monitor. Using Android Splashtop I was able to connect to my desktop and opened VLC's capture screen. Saw the kids making faces as they sang into the monitor. Wife & I had a great laugh. Now I'm wondering if it isn't a little "big brother" creepy instead? A totally unplanned for use of my beloved droid. Won't do it again, PROMISE!

On Android, long clicking on a url, brings up a Share Link option. When used in combination with JDownloaderRC, its an awesome way to download links you encounter in your feeds on your backend server running JDownloader.

So how do I easily share my blog posts on G+. Is inserting the link acceptable? http://istoff.blogspot.com

Another visitor.  Stay awhile, stay forever! I couldn't resist. I had to try hooking up the Playstation 3 Controller to my Asus eee Pad Transformer Tablet.  The Asus is running the latest Honeycomb 3.2 via the Prime Custom Rom. Without much fuss, I now have various emulators running on my 32" TV using a Bluetooth Sixaxis controller to play.  I tested a few roms using Gensoid and Snesoid, but my fave's are currently the Amiga Emulator UAE4Droid and Frodo, the Commodore 64 emulator. The latter is the clue to the opening line of this blog post.  +1 to you if you get the reference. It all works relatively painlessly once its setup, but keybindings per emulator can get tricky.  I have DOSBox as well, but I guess the fastest way to have all this stuff setup is using a keyboard dock to help you debug it and then you should be fine.  Its a bit fiddly using the onscreen keyboards and toggling various modes, but its not impossible.  It might be daunting for a newbie though

I can't believe we haven't had this before.  One of the things you can do very easily on a Linux box is to integrate your documents or config folders into a Version Control System.  For the uninitiated, a VCS is typically used by programmers to track changes to programs and allow snapshots or releases / versions to be made.  Its not really designed for document folders, but it has the side effect of tracking changes over time to your documents.  It can be done seamlessly on a scheduled basis without much intervention on your part.  At any point you can revert back in time to previous versions of a file in order to recover changes you might have lost.  Its a very handy technique which requires quite a bit of skill to get working seamlessly.  Once you use it, you realise how powerful and convenient this can be. In OSX Lion, Apple has wrapped this functionality in a fantastic GUI for your documents.  I was working on a document that went through many layout and artwork changes o

Hooked up my Android Tablet to PS3 Controller over Bluetooth yesterday. Fired up Impossible Mission C64 using the Frodo Emulator. Geekness, Greatness, Goodness...

dad was a lifelong arsenal fan. he would have liked this image. it's from the cover of the funeral leaflet for the service tomorrow. originally a number 8 shirt belonging to Nasri.

Funeral for my dad tomorrow. Arrangements sorted, speeches written and rewritten. hoping for good weather and a fantastic send off.

If you haven't bought the Humble Indie Bundle 3 yet, you're missing out! http://go.madmimi.com/redirects/f239845ee6488f9e4a45d0ea9beaf610?pa=4674112866 http://go.madmimi.com/redirects/f239845ee6488f9e4a45d0ea9beaf610?pa=4674112866

If you have a rooted Android device, highly recommend the following. Use CIFSMANAGER to map remote shares (samba or windows) to folders on your sdcard. Then browse via your filemanager or mediaplayer to play your video content wirelessly. For the mediaplayer, recommend Rock Player & Moboplayer and lately have tried Dice Player which is the only one that plays some of my mkv's with ac3 sound. Without rooting, ES File Manager will also try to stream remote shares while browsing, but its not as seamless an option. When this works, its nice to think you have a multi-terabyte internal sdcard in your Android Device!

So I needed to do some photo editing on OSX. Needed to do some detailed masking of backgrounds out of an image. I turned to the GIMP on OSX. Weird. 9 out of 10 people would have gone for Photoshop.

Just upgraded to Lion today.  Not bad for $29 that I can use on multiple computers.  Installation is easy and brings some more tablet style functionality to the desktop.  Not sure if I will change my workflow to use these new features. So far so good.  Had to upgrade my NX Client to connect to my Fedora machines & just started upgrading Virtualbox now. Oh, 1 minor thing. My Gimp stopped working.  Causes X11 to crash in a loop. Might have to boot a Linux VM just to do some graphics work.